At least 32 people were killed and 90 wounded in two bomb explosions in the Syrian city of Homs on Monday, monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The blasts, one from a car bomb and another from a suicide attack, struck the Zahra district in the middle of the city, said the Britain-based Observatory, which monitors the conflict through a network of contacts on the ground.
Syria’s state news agency SANA reported two car bomb blasts, but gave a lower initial toll of six dead and 37 wounded.
It was the second major attack in the city since a ceasefire deal took effect earlier this month, paving the way for the government to take over the last rebel-controlled area of Homs.
Twin blasts on Dec. 12, also in Zahra, killed at least 16 people. Islamic State claimed responsibility for that attack, saying it had detonated a suicide car bomb.
Under the Homs ceasefire deal, at least 700 insurgent fighters and members of their families left the last rebel-controlled area of the city, al Waer district. The United Nations presided over implementation of the deal.
Mr. Assad’s government has increased military force against groups rejecting the deals, backed by strikes from the Russian Air Force, which has been bombing rebel targets in Syria since late September. “The cowardly and desperate terrorist bombings are a response to the growing spirit of national reconciliation in many Syrian areas in tandem with the grand victories of our heroic army,” Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi said.
Hundreds of fighters and civilians evacuated from besieged Syrian areas
Buses evacuated several hundred fighters and civilians from two besieged areas in Syria on Monday under a deal between warring parties backed by the United Nations, aid workers and sources familiar with the deal said.
At least 130, mostly wounded, rebel fighters left the town of Zabadani for the nearby Lebanese border at the same time as 350 fighters and civilians from pro-government besieged Shi’ite towns in northwestern Syria headed for the Turkish border.
Under the deal, the fighters from the Islamist Ahrar al-Sham group and other local Syrian rebel factions holed up in Zabadani for months have been promised safe passage to Beirut airport and then on to Turkey.
At the same time, families and fighters in two besieged Shi’ite towns in the mainly rebel-held northwestern province of Idlib were heading to Turkey and were then due to fly to Beirut.
Relief workers and rebel fighters helped carry several young men in wheelchairs onto ambulances in a square in Zabadani, one witness told Reuters.
The once popular resort city, northwest of the capital Damascus, was one of the rebels’ last strongholds along the border. Before the 2011 outbreak of the Syrian conflict it had also formed part of a supply route for weapons sent by Syria to the Lebanese Shi’ite militant group Hezbollah.
Much of the town was devastated in a major offensive launched in July against the insurgents by the Syrian army and its Hezbollah allies.